> Again, everybody is square in the deal. Only if you take the surrounding system as given. The original question was this: > Put another way, if you founded

> Again, everybody is square in the deal. Only if you take the surrounding system as given. The original question was this: > Put another way, if you founded a company, created thousands of jobs for families and individuals, and made a fortune, why should the state be the one who decides what happens with your money? And the answer is that the state gets to decide what happens with the money, because if not for people banding together into nations, creating a state, taxing people, and using those taxes to enrich their nation over centuries, eventually reaching a state where a large part of a continent on this planet is occupied by some 300 million people, speaking the same language, using the same currency, having computers, wanting to connect, and therefore creating a niche for a social network to grow so big that its founder could employ thousands of people and amass a fortune. No deal is ever squared in our society. We are continuously using the amassed production of the past, and paying it forward. > This thinking is so poisonous and destructive and pervasive that I'm starting to wonder if it is either due to some natural law of human nature or some grand conspiracy to destroy modern society. You have it backwards. If modern society is destroyed, it would prove the point, because we wouldn't have twenty-something computer-whiz billionaires for a very long time, not until we've rebuilt all of this again.